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Saturday, February 21, 2015

The quilt on the cover of the fall 2013 issue of Modern Quilts Unlimited was the source of my latest finish. The quilt's designer is Jen Eskridge and she created an interesting pattern that was fun and rather different than anything I've made to date.

I gathered up a collection of fabrics that all fell into the same group of colors: brown, gray, black, white, and off white. I made a bunch of circles. Some circles were sewn inside bigger circles, others were scattered to overlap. While I followed the layout above in general, mine comes out looking slightly different. There is less space between the circles, and I think I wound up with more circles than in the original. Still, this was a great, easy-to-follow pattern.

I finished this top almost a year ago and was immediately intimidated by all of the white space I needed to quilt. I wanted to do something creative in the background, but instead I settled on quilting a variety of motifs in the circles themselves and doing a plain meander in the background. I'm not disappointed. When the light hits it just right, there's such texture!

Here is a shot of it while in the middle of quilting the background:

And here a couple of close-ups of the circles. Hopefully you can see some of the different ways I quilted the circles.

Here's a shot of the back of the quilt:

I kind of like looking at the back, even though some of my quilting isn't as smooth as I'd like.

This is going to a former co-worker as her "good-bye" present. She has waited very patiently for it. We're having lunch soon so I can give it to her.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

A couple of years ago I took a class from Teri Henderson Tope on reverse applique. This is a method where the top layer is cut away to reveal the fabric underneath. (Regular applique involves sewing pieces of fabric down to a background.) The class involved making a small floral piece and the applique work was done totally by hand. I only managed to sew a few of the petals of one flower in the class that day, so every now and then I would pick it up and work on it for a little while. When the block was finished I sewed the corner pieces on and decided to hand quilt it. That, too, was something I did little by little. And low and behold, last week I finally finished it.

This first picture is a close-up. Hopefully you can see some of the applique stitching.

And this second picture is the finished quilt. It measures just 17" x 17".

When I first began quilting I hand pieced and hand quilted everything I made. Slowly I transitioned to using my machines for all of my piecing and quilting. In doing this project I realized how much I still enjoy hand quilting and I've taken steps to make sure I do more of it this year. I'll tell you about it next time out.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Last month while I was out in California to spend Christmas with my in-laws, I had the great pleasure of meeting up with our TBR coordinator, SuperWendy. She took me to an awesome used bookstore with a whole room full of romance. As I write this I am kicking myself for not taking a picture of the Room of Awesome. Anyhow, while I now buy pretty much only in digital, there were some titles I was anxious to buy to fill in my print keeper collection. I scored about a dozen of those. There was also a little section of old Signet Regencies. As I browsed through, I picked out this book by Gayle Buck (no website found), an author I had enjoyed reading before. This was one I had not read.

So even though it had only been in the TBR pile 4 weeks, I picked it out because it was short (this month's theme) and in honor of my visit with Wendy.

Love for Lucinda is the story of our heroine, a recent widow who had a brief, unhappy marriage to a libertine. Lucinda's late husband kept her exiled in the country and now that her period of mourning is over, she is determined to return to London to resume the social life that was interrupted when her husband banished her. As a young widow with a modest fortune, she attracts a lot of attention. There's her wastrel cousin who wants her money, a match-making mama who wants Lucinda for her son, an acquaintance from the country who is courting her, and her husband's cousin who is her friend-- to name a few. I think this book would probably be called a "Regency Romp" because of the humorous situation of all of these men after Lucinda.

This book is all Lucinda and her return to society. With the exception of some odd sentences here and there, the POV is Lucinda's. The rigid structure of polite society is a major part of the story. Lucinda is careful to have a companion so that all of the proprieties are observed. She also ends up helping her late husband's sister come out into society. There are so many parties and balls as well as all of the men in her orbit that somehow the romance is left until the 9th page from the end. It was kind of obvious who the hero was going to be, but just to be sure I cheated and read the last page when I was only about 15-20% into the book. By the time I was 75% in, I was frustrated because Lucinda and her hero spent so little time on the page together. It is hard to consider this at all a romance just because two people end up together at the end. Actually, 3 couples end up together as both the companion and the sister-in-law find true love as well. All neatly wrapped up and mostly off the page. Lots of telling, little showing.

So sadly, this book was a bust. Still, it's a nifty souvenir of a wonderful morning spent with a kind friend who knows all the best places to go. Thanks, Wendy!

Monday, December 29, 2014

My last finished quilt of the year is a twin-sized quilt that's my version of this quilt by Melissa Corry found on the Moda Bake Shop site. I even used the same fabric, Sphere by Zen Chic. The fun thing about this particular pattern is that the maker needs to put the strips together randomly making it highly unlikely that there are two identical quilts made from this pattern. But since I used the same fabric, mine looks very much like the one Melissa made.

I like the name, "Mister DJ," because it does remind me of the indicators on a music board. It's a very clever design.

This pattern uses two rolls of pre-cut strips. I had to separate the strips into high-volume, low-volume piles and then cut them into sets of varying lengths. The cut sections were then paired and sewn together with a small strip of the green. I wound up with 210 strips. In a pile they looked like this:

They had to be pieced together randomly, so in order to ensure that, I jumbled them up into a pile like this:

And I just grabbed and sewed, grabbed and sewed, until it looked like this:

Similarly, I grabbed the pairs randomly to build the blocks:

I put the blocks on my design wall:

And then I had a quilt top:

Here are some pictures of the quilting:

Because I was thinking of the lights on a sound board, I quilted loopy horizontal lines in the bottom, darker strips and loopy vertical lines in the upper, lighter strips. I put no quilting in the green. I quilted with two colors of Aurifil thread--gray for the upper parts, turquoise for the lower parts.

Kudos to Melissa Corry, for an imaginative and easy-to-follow pattern. I would like to make it again some time, perhaps using batiks or fall colors. The trick is finding a fabric collection with a good contrast and enough color to make parts of the quilt pop out. Of course, I have all those other things I need to finish first!

My 2014 tally is 7 finished quilts and 1 finished bag. I made 3 additional quilt tops that are waiting to be quilted (I haven't shown them here yet). Looking ahead to 2015, I want to quilt all three of those. I also want to return to working on my Aviatrix Medallion quilt and of course I have a few other things I'm anxious to start. So here's hoping for plenty of quality quilting time.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

To Scotland with Love is Patience Griffin's debut book. And it's the first book in her "Kilts and Quilts" series. Quilts! Quilts! ..... Oh, what's that? The theme this month is the holidays? Never fear! While the grass is green on the cover, the first two-thirds of the book take place in the days and weeks leading up to Christmas and it ends a few weeks after Easter. Lots of holiday stuff within. And quilts.

Cait Macleod moved to Chicago from Scotland with her parents when she was 13. A short time after that, Cait's mother died of cancer. Cait grew up, began a career as an investigative journalist, but gave it up to marry her husband, Tom. He turns out to be a serial cheater and dies in the middle of sex with another woman. I assume Cait's father is also dead because Cait decides to sell everything she owns and move back to her home town in Scotland where her only remaining relative lives, her maternal grandmother, Deydie. Cait and Deydie haven't had much contact with one another over the years. Deydie is angry that Cait's father took his wife/her daughter away and that she died far from home. Cait hasn't wanted to admit that her marriage has been a spectacular failure, so she has avoided talking to her grandmother. But Chicago holds nothing but bad memories and Cait needs to start over. Why not go home?

On her first night back she runs into Graham Buchanan, a major movie star. Graham is known for keeping his personal life very private and he often disappears for weeks at a time. No one knows where he goes. When Cait runs into him, she realizes that her hometown is also his hometown and she may have stumbled upon the scoop of a lifetime, something that would surely jump-start her career again.

Cait's reunion with her grandmother does not go well, and it's Graham who acts as a bit of a buffer between the two. Also acting as a buffer are the ladies of the village who gather at Deydie's every week to quilt together. Cait remembers quilting with her mother and grandmother, and in fact has also become a quilter. She immediately joins the ladies and their sewing projects. Soon Cait is getting to know the people in the village again, and getting to know Graham much better. She postpones her plans to out Graham's whereabouts, especially as she begins to develop feelings for him.

This book is not at all an inspie, but it does deal with Christian themes as Christmas day approaches. Cait is angry at men, angry at God, and finding it hard to enter into the required religious activities given her feelings. I thought Cait's attitude toward the old rituals was rather realistic given her past. I liked that the book even dealt with that aspect of Cait's feelings.

One thing I found hard to believe was that in this day of TMZ, no one on the planet knew where Graham disappeared to when he wasn't working. Sure, the villagers vow to keep his secret, but I wasn't buying that no one was telling. Graham has his reasons for keeping his home secret and they make him an interesting character. The sparring between him and Cait was funny in spots.

All in all, this was an enjoyable debut and even without the quilts I would probably read the next book. But since there are quilts, I will definitely read the next one which is due in early January.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Judy Niemeyer is a quilt teacher, pattern designer, fabric designer, and all-around very creative person. She and her family run a company called Quiltworx.com and I highly suggest you click on that link, go to the Products tab and select Patterns to see the wide range of exquisite quilts she has designed. Her stuff has become very popular of late. Her patterns use a unique paper piecing technique that is remarkable for the way it helps you organize all of the pieces you need to make her designs. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so I took a class in November from my local quilt shop using one of their most basic patterns, called One. It is a long curved leaf sewn to a two-color background. It makes a nice table runner or a nifty wall-hanging.

Here is half of my leaf before it has been trimmed:

Here are both halves of my leaf, trimmed, but not sewn together:

Here are a bunch of leaves held by some of my classmates:

Here's my leaf, all finished and quilted:

Close-ups!

I doubt I'll ever make one of the big quilts, but I would definitely make this one again and some of her other smaller designs. It was fun and quite fast once I got my pieces organized.

This quilt is a retirement gift for my boss, the Director of the library where I work. He has been my boss for the past 26+ years and I could not have been luckier. He has been kind, encouraging, flexible, and supportive. It's going to be hard to walk back in there after the Christmas break and know he's not around anymore. Godspeed, D.